Thursday, 28 January 2016

After
5 years of part-time studying; countless hours of sitting in libraries and reading (188 sources cited), writing, re-writing and more re-writing and watching and
analysing about 20 films again and again and again, I submitted my PHD thesis
today. It is 292 pages and 99,543 words long.

Now I've just got to get through the viva exam around Easter time, and then
hopefully get the thesis published as a book, and hopefully get a lecturing job out of it now!
Thanks to everyone who has been in any way supportive over the last 5
years. It's been awesome and I'm going to miss it.

As I'm now in a navel-gazing kind of mood, here's a look back at some of the highs and lows of the past 5 years, as I have attempted to complete this thesis, watched a lot of awful films (and some really good ones too) and got a short book on The Blair Witch Project published at the same time!

Wednesday, 27 January 2016

What does Leonardo DiCaprio have to do to win an Oscar? In
The Revenant, there have been rumours that his character gets raped by a grizzly
bear. That should probably do it. Leo plays Hugh Glass, an 1820s frontiersman
who is on a hunting expedition in the wilderness along with his mixed race son,
when his team are attacked by Native Americans. Glass is then savaged (but not
raped) by a bear, leaving him with
horrendous injuries. Although two men (Tom Hardy’s Fitzgerald and Will Poulter’s
Bridger) are left with Glass and his son to watch over him and give him a
proper burial when the time comes, Fitzgerald betrays Glass and leaves him for
dead and with a bitter taste for revenge. Glass must survive alone in the
wilderness and find the men responsible for killing his son.

The Revenant is a story of rebirth and revenge, a howl for
tolerance and a poetic, tragic look back at an America that has all but
disappeared. It might seem like a deceptively simple story; man is mauled, must
survive his injuries and being left to die, and man seeks revenge against those
who wronged him, but there’s much more beneath the surface. It’s hero is a man
who has embraced America and it’s native inhabitants, whereas Tom Hardy’s
Fitzgerald is a ruthless, self-serving bastard whose intolerance and hatred
seethes inside him. They aren’t particularly complex characters, but their
eventual showdown becomes much more than a bloody brutal fight between two men.

The scale of the suffering of the characters (and the cast
and crew) is all up on screen. The camera lens is constantly fogged up by the
actors’ breath, reminding just how damn cold it is. The beards are pure icicles
and the shivers rack through the actors’ bodies. By getting his team out into
the untouched parts of Canada and Argentina’s harshest backwoods, Inarritu has
pushed them to the limit and The Revenant’s ode to suffering feels more real
than it could ever have felt if any of this had been faked. If Oscars were given
out for effort, Inarritu and his crew and actors should be applauded for
getting away from the green screens and California sunshine and making their
movie in one of the most inhospitable environments imaginable.

Nature is the real star of The Revenant. It dwarves the
characters. It’s the most vicious antagonist, but also the helper that aids
Leo’s Glass most in his escape from other men. He uses waterfalls, cliffs and
dead horses to survive. The landscapes are impossible to fake and The Revenant
gets its real power from being filmed out in the incredible wilderness. One
scene sees Leo crawl to the edge of a cliff. The sight of a massive river
cutting through the earth far below the cliff is nothing short of breathtaking.
DOP Emmanuel Lubezki savours it all, making this look like the bloodiest, but
most beautiful Malick movie you’ve ever seen.

Filmmaking should be hard. But The Revenant takes the
challenges of bringing a story to the screen to a new level. The struggle to
make this film is reflected in every frame. It’s a brutal film, born out of
brutal conditions. Don’t just give Leo his Oscar at last; everyone involved
deserves an award for their commitment.

Tuesday, 26 January 2016

Youth, the latest film from Paolo Sorrentino (The Great Beauty), hits UK cinemas on Friday 29th January. I was lucky enough to catch it at the London Film Festival late in 2015, where I reviewed it for Starburst Magazine. Here's a snippet of my review:

Michael Caine
and Harvey Keitel must have thought that writer/director Paolo Sorrentino was
taking the piss sending them a script titled Youth. On the
other hand, who could resist working with the Oscar-winning Sorrentino,
especially when the long-in-the-tooth acting legends get to spend most
of the shoot in a luxury Swiss spa in one of the most beautiful
locations in the world.Caine and Keitel star as old friends Fred and Mick
respectively. Fred is a retired composer, who while enjoying his
vacation at the spa is visited by his daughter Lena (Rachel Weisz). He
is resisting coming out of retirement to conduct a concert of his
greatest work for the Queen of England. Mick, on the other hand, is an
active film director, desperately trying to figure out an ending for his
next film with a small group of writers who have joined him at the spa.

Saturday, 23 January 2016

Abducted
seven years ago, a woman has been held captive in a garden shed, repeatedly
raped by the man she calls Old Nick and has become mother to a boy who is now
celebrating his fifth birthday in the only room he has ever known. This one
space is their whole world, particularly young Jack, who has never known
anything but the four walls in which he lives.

Brie Larson
as the abducted woman is brilliant, but this isn't really Ma's story. It's her
son's, and Jacob Tremblay is sensational. Helped by Emma Donoghue's script from
her own novel and Lenny Abrahamson's immersive direction, Tremblay gives a
performance that belies his age and is staggering in its range. He is
completely convincing as a boy who has never known any different, and then who
finds himself in a world that is both endless and terrifying.

This could
have been an exploitative thriller ripped from recent headlines and handled
with all of the sensitivity of a Charlie Hebdo cover. Instead, there is only a
few central scenes that get the pulse racing. The rest is incredibly stirring
and yet still presented with a huge amount of restraint. While most films would
have saved any escape attempts for the climax, Room is concerned more with the
aftermath of such an ordeal, than just the method of escaping. Still, when Ma
puts her plan in motion, it is riveting, terrifying and overwhelmingly
emotional.

The
decision to tell the story from Jack's point of view puts us completely in the
mind of this little boy for whom the outside world might just be scarier than
anything else he has ever experienced. When Room leaves its titular space, it
could be overwhelming, and it sometimes is. But it’s anchored by Tremblay’s
performance and the quiet tragedy of how these characters will forever be
affected by their time in isolation together.

What should
be a horrendous ordeal, both for the characters and audience, becomes something
beautiful and heart-breaking, but ultimately life-affirming.

Monday, 18 January 2016

I caught up with actress Katie Featherstone at a gala
screening of Paranormal Activity 4 to find out how it feels to be returning for
another round of found footage thrills, what the chances are of yet another
Paranormal Activity film and what she would like to do after the franchise
finishes.

What’s your favourite
scary movie?

KF: The one that scared me the most growing up was Candyman
starring Tony Todd.That’s the one I
watched multiple times in junior high with my best friend and tortured
her.She was a good friend so she always
watched it with me.

Paranormal Activity
is such a big part of the found footage horror phenomenon.What do you think is the appeal of these
films and can the trend last forever?

KF: I don’t know if it will go on forever.Everything goes in phases so it will go on
for a while I’m sure.The great thing
about it is that it is a really intimate way to tell a story.It’s really kind of voyeuristic which I think
for a scary movie if it’s done well can make it even more frightening and it
gives it even more of a sort of right-in-the-room with you kind of feel.So we’ll see how long it continues as long as
fans stay excited!

When you made the
first film, did you have any idea you would be here for a fourth film?

No we made the first film and we never knew if it would be
seen in theatres.We didn’t know if it
would make it to a festival.We didn’t
know anything.We just focussed on doing
good work and so for that movie to be a success and for us to be here
celebrating a fourth film is really incredible and it’s all down to our amazing
fans.They really stuck by us from the
beginning and all the way through which is why an event like this is really
fun.

What do you do
differently to keep things fresh and keep the shocks and scares coming in this
fourth film in the series?

I think you have to maintain the integrity of where the
franchise started and keep with those same kinds of scares.You just amp it up a little bit and tell the
story in a way that continues to be interesting by utilising new kinds of
technology but still remaining true to the style.So it’s the same kind of movie but it’s just
the world’s a little bigger and scarier.

Has your belief in
the supernatural increased after doing these films?

I think that there are definitely spirits or ghosts.There certainly unexplainable things in this
world that kind of make the hair on the back of your neck stand up.But I had that belief before these
movies.It’s the same as it was.

There are often
stories about spooky things happening for real on horror film sets.Were there any experiences like that on these
films?

We are the most boring.We have so much fun making these.It’s like a giant family… coming together and making this fun, scary
movie.It’s scary to watch but it’s just
joyous to make.So nothing too freaky or
scary.Maybe if you ask the other kids,
because their imaginations run wild.They
had some times when they scared themselves!

And how do you find
it working with kids rather than adults?

It’s amazing!They
have such interesting and explosive imaginations.It’s such a great thing to be around
especially when you’re doing something so improvisational and so rooted in the
moment.They’re great at really scaring
themselves which makes it more fun.

And what would you
like to do once the franchise ends?

Next on my bucket list is comedy.I’d love to do a single camera comedy or do
an indie comedy movie.I’ve got a couple
of things in the works that I’m excited about that I’ll be talking about once
it’s confirmed but comedy is next on my list.

So is there scope for
the Paranormal Activity series to continue after this one?

KF: There are certainly many, many ways that the story could
go and I know that they’ve talked about what those ways are.But I have no idea if they’ll make another
one.I always try to think of the one
I’m doing as the last. Because who knows?You never know if there will be another one.I certainly don’t.But if they made another one, I hope they ask
me to be in it!

Untouchable directors Olivier
Nakache and Eric Toledano have a lot to smile about.Their little French film about an aristocrat
quadriplegic (Francois Cluzet) and
his caretaker from the projects (Omar Sy)
has had international success at countless awards ceremonies and film festivals
and blown all box office expectations out of the water.Nominated for nine Cesar awards (the French
Oscars) but winning only won for Best Actor (the irresistible Omar Sy), the directors came to London ahead of the UK release of the film in 2012.

The Weinstein Company are distributing Untouchable and after such incredible success across the globe,
Nakache and Toledano are hoping the film will be as warmly embraced in the UK
as it was in the rest of the world.

Read on to find out what the pair had to say about tackling
a comedy drama dealing with the thorny issues of race and disability, how they
feel about a US remake of
the film that has brought them such huge international success and why they say
the UK
is a big influence on their style of comedy.

Untouchable is based
on a true story but how does the film differ from real life?

ET: Yes we are in fiction, so we decided to write that and
to find how to express our style and our sense of comedy.The main situations are true. For example the
opening scene with the cops is totally true… In France we have two or three arrests
already, problems with the guys who did the same fake thing with the police as
we saw in the movie and so they go to jail. And for example the fact that Driss
connects Philippe to the woman is true because he… organised the wedding of
Philippe.It was not in France, it was in Morocco.The place changes but the idea is the
same.Now when you do a comedy you are looking
for the same and you try to find new situations to express the kind of relationship
so that’s why we chose for example to invent totally the opera with the tree in
German.We invent the quiz with the
classical music and the dance and everything.All this is our interpretation of the relationship but what is true is
that it was really politically incorrect, the relationship.There were no limits in jokes, no limit in
everything and this is the main idea.

ON: They lived together during ten years so it’s very long.So we tried to sum up for a complete movie so
we took some anecdotes, some pieces of their lives and make something…

ET: …special

ON: …balanced

In the true story
Philippe’s friend is an Arab and in this film he’s from Senegal
originally so what informed that decision?Why did you decide to change that?

ET: We did not decide to change.We wrote the script for Omar because it’s a
long collaboration between Omar and us.It’s our third movie with him.We
made a short movie with him and we knew that one day we would take him for a
main character and when we discovered this story, it had Abdel, you’re totally
right he’s not black but we knew that it’s a part for Omar.

Out of this, we have to make something clear because in each
country it’s hard to understand our culture of people.In France you have Paris and you have the
suburb, you call it the project here and in the United States… and in this kind
of project you have many immigrants and this is a social group and most of them
are black and Arabs.This is the main
population that we have… and Omar is representing as equal the group.So no one in France told us, ‘hey it was an
Arab’.Because they speak in the same
language… they dress in the same style so the idea of the movie was, how can we
imagine the meeting between an aristocrat and a guy from the suburb, a guy from
the project.

And Omar is the best one to do that.In France, because everyone knows him,
his personality, his character, everything on TV, everyone knows that he had a
handle on this, he knows how to do that. So that’s why we switch very easy and
even we didn’t wonder ourselves is it a problem?But I have to say now after 50 countries that
in the United States
it was a problem.You can’t choose a
black like this.If you choose a black
you have an idea so I have to explain each time that in France after 90 million admissions,
one French in three, no one asked but I understand the question.

ON:And when Abdel
discovered the movie, he said ‘oh great I discovered that I am black… I never
realised’.

As a viewer you can
take many meanings from the title, Untouchable.Does that term apply to Driss as in no one else came close to how he can
make Philippe feel?

ET: There were many reasons and it was like a sign for us
because we were looking for a title and we had a marketing problem, a very
simple marketing problem.If you do a
drama, you choose very easily a title.And
you make audiences understand they going to see a drama.If you choose a comedy, you choose a title of
comedy and everyone knows that.If you
have something like our movie which is really a mix between a drama comedy or
comedy drama or whatever you have to choose something very between.Untouchable means many things.First of all, when we told the story of this
movie, everyone said don’t touch this story.And it’s true.Don’t touch
because we don’t touch comedy and disability, comedy and projects, comedy and
immigration.This is taboo.This is a big taboo in society.Disability… you can’t laugh at that.You cannot make jokes with that.Immigration… wow this is taboo!Religion, Muslims, Black, Arab, don’t touch
so it was like a challenge to say Untouchables… we can touch.

And also we have the Indian caste that we call the
Untouchables.This is the last, the
fifth class in the Indian society and they live outside the town.They are not allowed to live with the others
and we have a similarity with the guys of the suburb, of the project because
it’s a kind of separation, segregation.We have the rich whites who live in the town and in Paris…
and the poor have to go outside of Paris
and… you can find like a metaphor of Untouchables.

And we decided that, it’s hard to touch someone who doesn’t
feel.Nothing.And you have to change him like a baby, you
have to take care of him, you have to give him some food and there is something
disgusting, you don’t want to touch so he is untouchable.

They are untouchables and we shot a special sequence of
paragliding and they are on the mountain and they are out of the world.And really on the real sense of the
shooting, they are above everything and we felt when we shot that, that they were
untouchable and unreachable; protected from society and from conventions.When you are an aristocrat, you don’t go with
a black from the suburb.This is a
convention.But they are crossing the
line of the convention and that makes them totally untouchable for us.

You said that there
were no limits between the real Philippe and Abdel about what they could say to
each other.When you took the script to
Philippe, was there anything that he thought went too far?

ON: Just physical things.When he read the script, he said ‘Guys watch out because I can’t do this
or I can’t do that’.You know when
wemet him for the first time, we talked
with him for… three days in Morocco and he said ‘ok guys, I agree that you are
going to make a movie because I feel that you’re going to make [people] laugh
with my story and I want this.I want
people to laugh with jokes.I want you to
cross the line because people in my state want this you know?He likes to make jokes with people and we
discover after the release because we met a lot of other associations and
people with disabilities and they want that.They want laughter, they want talk, they want discussion…

ET: … Connection

ON: … If the brain works, everything works but we know that
sometimes when we wrote the script, we say oh maybe we’ve gone too far but if
it’s funny for us, it’s funny so we have our own limits.We don’t want to be mean or you know we have
our own limits about the humour.But…
this story interests us because of this because we can put a lot of comedy and
Omar is a secret weapon for comedy.Everything is ok with him.

The relationship
between Philippe and Driss is very close and it’s a really good dynamic.How did you get that from Francois and Omar?

ON: Every person who meets Omar fell immediately in love
with him.It’s very easy.

ET: It’s a chemical problem with Omar.

ON: He’s a good man.He’s a good father.

ET: He’s very humble.He knows how to respect everyone so it’s hard to not be with Omar in a
perfect relationship.So as with the
others, Francois felt in love with him… Because he [Omar] is not an actor and
because he didn’t go to the dramatic art course and he didn’t learn the work of
acting, he is very spontaneous and natural and he’s not really playing.And when really Francois felt that, he was
really excited.He said ‘wow I’m playing
with this guy and it’s going to be enormous because he’s not playing, he’s just
living the situation.You explain to him
the situation, you say ‘you have to do that’ and he’s just living the
situation.You say dance, he
dances.You say play, he plays but just realise
that this guy has ten brothers and sisters.He grew up in the project far from Paris
and he has no idea about all of this.His father was a labourer.His
mother was a cleaner of offices in Paris
at night.No money so he’s coming from
the base.

One of the most
memorable scenes in the film is Philippe’s party when they are playing different sorts of
music.They play the Vivaldi and the
‘Boogie Wonderland’.Which one do you
guys prefer?

ET: Vivaldi is the first one.To be honest we are very big fans of Earth,
Wind and Fire.We are very proud about
one thing.They make a tour in France and it’s
written on the poster, ‘The music of Untouchable’. (laughs)

ON: Now we are waiting for the concert of Vivaldi. (laughs)

ET: We don’t know why but he’s never coming to Paris.But we discover the classical music with
Philippe because when he explained to us that we were looking for a common
language between the two guys and music was very good because you can speak
about music and you can understand who is who and with the classical we felt
something special.There is something
very beautiful in the classical [music].And that’s why we decided to put the classical music in when he [Driss]
comes back to the suburb to help his brother with the problems.Vivaldi was a real discovery.

The scene where Driss
is shaving Philippe and he says ‘one cut and this could all be over’ is very
dark but it quickly turns light again.

ET: This is directly a metaphor of this movie.They are very close to… something very
dark.They are close to the dark because
one is really suffering of a physical problem, even if he’s rich, you can’t
avoid being in suffering.As rich as you
are, you cannot avoid that.And the
other one has no future because when you grew up in this kind of neighbourhood,
you have no future.It’s very
predictable…We were thinking about
emotion, dark and joy.And the joy can
be very close to that [the dark].Have
you never seen that sometime you are in a cemetery and you have a need to joke
or to say something very horrible but just to say, this isn’t theatre or the
circus? Everything is nothing.And this
is for us, the function of humour, to take a dramatisation and to have a step
back on the situation.And I think when
he says, ‘one [cut] and it would be better for me’, he’s really thinking about
that because he has a beard and he was depressed at this moment.But the relationship is wonderful because he [Driss]
can take him and get it out of him and how?He makes him laugh.Hitler and
Freddie Mercury [Driss shave his beard to make Philippe look like these
figures] and everyone is laughing and after, he is in a good mind, he can take
him back to the life with a girl.Because love is the only solution.

I remember that in the movie of My Left Foot of Jim Sheridan,
about the painter, at the end, the only solution was to come back to love with
the nurse and it’s always the same situation.As Olivier said when you have the brain, you can do everything, you are
normal.It’s just the physical body
problem.

How was the first
screening for Philippe and Abdel?

ET: A bit severe

ON: It was in Morocco, an outside screening
around his [Philippe’s] pool…

ET: …with the dogs woof woof woof…

ON: …yes with the dogs, with the birds, with the children’s
noise

ET: …with couscous…

ON: Yes with the couscous and because he does not travel a
lot so we took a copy and we came to Morocco and it was a great moment
for us.We are behind him and we know
when we saw the wheelchair move, it’s a good sign because he laughs.Because he looked at the movie with his wife…

ET: …new wife…

ON: …with his new wife and with people from his family so
maybe it was a little bit touchy you know with massage.But at the end we saw tears in his eyes and
cheeks and he said ‘I stand up and I clap with my hands’.So we were very happy and he supports the
movie.That was the most important thing.

ET: Our most important thing was he was supporting the
movie, he was there on the official night… He was very involved.

We now know there
will be a US
remake.What are your thoughts on that?

ET: For us, we were happy, because we thought that it was a
good idea and now we made one year of touring the world, we saw that it’s
possible to reach the audience with this movie.So we understand that it’s only for one market, for the United States.Not really for the others.Because in the United States, we know that it’s
impossible to reach people with subtitles.But if I was the director of this movie, it will be a big challenge
because we did a good job...But we are
in a very good relationship with The Weinstein Company.They help us to have this huge success in the
world so we have to respect the fact that if it seems like a good idea… that’s
good for us and for them and we won’t be really involved.We’ll just have a look on this.The movie that we love, we did.

Some directors
(George Sluizer and Michael Haneke) have remade their own films for American
audiences.

ET: It’s bizarre… I think in the life of a director, you
could perhaps have ten or fifteen movies if you’re very brilliant… [unless you
are] Woody Allen or two or three exceptions, you can do many, many good movies
so I think there is no justification to do twice the same movie.For us it’s nonsense.

Do you have a favourite
part of the film or a part that you’re really excited for audiences to see?

ON: For me, I like the scene when… Omar shaves Francois
because for us, it’s exactly what we want to create in the movie.It is deep scenes with you know a core
moment, a moving moment and love.This
balance, this mix is difficult to try and it’s like a rollercoaster of emotions
and we like this because love is emotion and crying is emotion and we like to… surprise
the audience, like he said ‘just a cut and everything it’s over’ and after we
want to take the audience and make [them] laugh.

ET: It’s not original but I like… when Omar dances because the
symbol is so great for me.Dance for him
is so free, so easy and so moving and I have always the goose bumps.I like to see that because we did it one
shot.Omar said no rehearsal nothing,
just put me your music and let me do my thing.And I know that it was great.I
like also the big moment, the one that we had in the café in Paris.This is a famous café in Paris… it’s a souvenir for us because we shoot
it on one night everything and it was all the part where Philippe was saying his
history… and when two people are connected then there is a turning point as the
Americans would say.This is a turning
point of the screenplay.This is the
turning point of the movie…

It’s really good
timing for this film here with the Paralympics and the recent London riots.Disability and disenfranchised youth are very topical now.It will be interesting to see how the UK reacts to
this film.

ET: In general we are very curious about the audience
reaction here for many reasons.One
about the Paralympics, I entirely agree with you.The second one is because, we did a bit of
travel but we now have the choice to come or not to come in the country…. It’s
really true that we have big respect for the English culture.Why?Because on the music, on the cinema, we feel very near and you know… we
like and are total fans of Ricky Gervais
and Extras for example.Because in a certain way this is how to cross
the line in a different way… he cross the line about races, there is in Extras some things [that are] awful,
how can you say that?About race, about
blacks, about Jews, about everything but they cross the line and we like this
kind of humour.We like also… the social
comedy of England.

ON: You have Sacha
Baron Cohen and Mike Leigh.So it’s exactly what we like and the humour
with Monty Python inspires us…

ET:But we don’t
remember the name of the movie which takes place in a funeral home.We have the guy who dies and all the time we
have the guy who died here.It’s English
and a very big success.

ON: … with a dwarf…

Death at a Funeral?

ON: Yes!Death at a
Funeral!

ET: The line is crossed many times.

ON: … and Four Lions…

ET:… so we have really respect for the culture in England.So we wanted to come and we are very curious
about the reaction.We were curious
about the reaction in America.Even if we had many problems… We were curious
about Japan,
we are going to look at the audience like this [mimes a telescope].Laugh or not laugh.